Benham's imagination when he came to town. But it was a dream,
something that had never existed, something that indeed may never
materialize, and such dreams, though they are vivid enough in a study at
night, fade and vanish at the rustle of a daily newspaper or the
sound of a passing band. To come back again.... So it was with Benham.
Sometimes he was set clearly towards this world-state that Prothero
had talked into possibility. Sometimes he was simply abreast of the
patriotic and socially constructive British Imperialism of Breeze and
Westerton. And there were moods when the two things were confused in his
mind, and the glamour of world dominion rested wonderfully on the slack
and straggling British Empire of Edward the Seventh--and Mr. Rudyard
Kipling and Mr. Chamberlain. He did go on for a time honestly
entertaining both these projects in his mind, each at its different
level, the greater impalpable one and the lesser concrete one within it.
In some unimaginable way he could suppose that the one by some miracle
of ennoblement--and neglecting the Frenchman, the Russian, the German,
the American, the Indian, the Chinaman, and, indeed, the greater part of
mankind from the problem--might become the other....

All of which is recorded here, without excess of comment, as it
happened, and as, in a mood of astonished reminiscences, he came finally
to perceive it, and set it down for White's meditative perusal.

4

But to the enthusiasm of the young, dreams have something of the
substance of reality and realities, something of the magic of dreams.
The London to which Benham came from Cambridge and the disquisitions of
Prothero was not the London of a mature and disillusioned vision. It was
London seen magnified and distorted through the young man's crystalline
intentions. It had for him a quality of multitudinous, unquenchable
activity. Himself filled with an immense appetite for life, he was
unable to conceive of London as fatigued. He could not suspect these
statesmen he now began to meet and watch, of jaded wills and petty
spites, he imagined that all the important and influential persons in
this large world of affairs were as frank in their private lives and as
unembarrassed in their financial relationships as his untainted self.
And he had still to reckon with stupidity. He believed in the statecraft
of leader-writers and the sincerity of political programmes. And so
regarded, what an avenue to Empire was Whit